As he pushed through the front doors of her dorm, though he hadn’t been nervous around a girl since his early teens, his heart was pounding hard. He had just jogged up the stairs to the second floor when one of the doors opened and someone stepped into the hall.
The girl had on baggy jeans and an even baggier sweatshirt. Her hair was tucked up into a Stanford ball cap, and she had a loaded messenger bag slung across one shoulder. But even if most people would have looked right past her, he recognized her immediately. What, he wondered, was Serena doing wearing that disguise? Because that was clearly what it was.
She kept her head down as if she was thinking really hard about something, so it wasn’t until she was nearly at the stairs that she saw him.
He didn’t wait, couldn’t wait another second to tell her, “I need to apologize to you for the way I acted last night.”
For a moment surprise lit her features, but then her expression closed up so that he couldn’t figure out what she was thinking—or feeling—at all. “It doesn’t matter,” she said in a flat voice as she moved past him and down the stairs to head outside. “Just forget about it.”
But it did matter, and he couldn’t just forget about it. Or about her.
He’d been up all night trying to figure out a way to make things up to her, but now that he was with her again, the words he’d planned to say got muddled together in his head. “Last night, I was drunk and—”
She spun around on the grass to face him, her previously restrained expression now blazing with anger. “Do you really think that saying you were drunk and didn’t know what you were doing is how you apologize to a girl for grabbing her out of the blue and trying to convince her to sleep with you two minutes later?”
Damn it, he thought as she turned and started walking away even faster, he hadn’t meant to screw things up again. Or to make things worse. Especially when beneath her anger he could still see her disappointment.
“You’re completely right that it doesn’t matter how much I had to drink or what state of mind I was in. I shouldn’t have come on to you the way I did, and I definitely shouldn’t have tried to convince you to come upstairs to my bedroom. There’s no excuse for it, and I really am sorry for the way I behaved. You should be able to kiss a guy at a party without him dragging you off to bed by your hair.” He wished more than anything that he could just hit rewind and go back a day. A year, actually. So that he could have his mother back in time to save her from cancer and not screw things up with Serena. “I have two sisters, and if any guy tried to do to them what I did to you, I’d tear him apart.”
In her obvious shock at everything he’d just said, she stumbled over a thick tuft of grass. Her bag was so heavy that she would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed her arm. He heard her gasp softly at his touch before she pulled her arm away, but her face remained flushed…and she looked even more beautiful than she had the night before when she’d been in his arms.
He had come here today to tell her how sorry he was, not to hit on her again, but Sean still couldn’t stop his reaction to her. It was natural. Primal. Chemical. And so powerful that just being near her made him feel better—and clearer—than he had in months.She took a deep breath, then blew it out, pulling her hat off and shaking out her hair as if she didn’t quite know what she should do next. Maybe, he hoped, it was because she could still feel their connection, too, despite what an idiot he’d been?
“I also want you to know that I didn’t have any idea who you were last night.” When she looked at him in disbelief, he raised two fingers on his right hand. “Scout’s honor. I thought you looked a little familiar, but it wasn’t until after you left that my friend Kurt told me who you were.”
The way she tensed at that told him more than she likely intended to reveal about how she felt about her fame. Clearly, she wasn’t big on it. The thing was, Sean wasn’t too surprised by this because his rock-star brother was like that, too. Drew hated when his ever-increasing fame got in the way of his music. Then again, Sean thought, modeling wasn’t exactly the same as writing and performing songs, was it? So if she hadn’t done it for the fame, why had she done it? And why was she here at Stanford when she could have been in Paris making thousands of dollars an hour in front of the cameras?
“If you didn’t recognize me, then why did you come up to me like that?”
Was she joking? Did she truly think that the only reason a guy would approach her was because she was famous and he wanted to say he’d made out with a celebrity?
Wanting to be as honest with her this morning as he’d been scuzzy the night before, he said, “You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, but it was more than just your beauty that drew me, Serena.” When she looked back up at him, he felt as though he was falling into her deep blue eyes. “You saw me.” He swallowed hard before adding, “And when we kissed, it was the most explosive, most intense thing I’ve ever felt in my life—” He reached for her cheek in the exact same way she had reached for his the night before. “—and everything bad just disappeared.”
* * *
The very last thing Serena had expected to see this morning was the guy from the frat party.
But he’d just surprised her even more with his heartfelt apology.
She didn’t have much experience with the opposite sex—much actually meaning none given the way her mother had hovered over her for her entire life at photo shoots and at industry parties and even in their hotel rooms—but she was still almost certain that most guys wouldn’t have apologized. No, they’d have told their friends that she was a frigid bitch, and they’d have been happy to let her think she’d brought it on herself by responding to his kisses the way she had. But they definitely wouldn’t have said that there was no excuse for what they’d done.
And everything he’d just said about the explosive sparks set off between them when they kissed? Well, the truth was that she was already feeling those sparks again.
Simply by being near him and looking into his eyes.
Last night, she’d been so intent on trying to experience new things that when he’d kissed her and it had been incredible, she’d temporarily forgotten everything but him. And that’s what had gotten her into trouble. She couldn’t let herself forget again just how hard she’d fought to leave her life as a model behind to come to Stanford and figure out who and what she actually wanted to be. Not just a hanger for designer clothes, not just a blank slate for makeup artists to paint on, but a teacher or a researcher or a writer. Or maybe something else entirely that she would discover during the next four years. The point was that she needed to give herself the chance to find out.